Have a read of Jeremy Grantham’s book. Seeing bubbles is reasonably easy. Forecasting when they pop and when to get out is very hard.
For example GMO as at the end of April were forecasting through the bubble that returns for large US equities would be negative over the next seven years. But since then the market has gone up by over 30%.
It could pop any day, or could grow for two more years.
Advice is to diversify your investments and make sure you avoid systemic risks. Read books by value investors.
Seeing bubbles is reasonably easy. Forecasting when they pop and when to get out is very hard.
Amen, $SIBLING. Even an idiot like me could see it coming in 2007, triggered by a young coworker asking me about interest-only housing loans. But what do you do about it? I sure didn't know how to short the real estate market, and watch The Big Short to find out how hard it was for them to do it. That, and the ol' "market can stay absolutely fucking bonkers longer than..." chestnut. I would have lost my ass anyway.
But back to the topic at hand, indeed, the timing is very hard. Margin calls and watching the price of a borrowed stock go up and up, those mean that if you have to ask you shouldn't be doing it. Other sibling comments have already said that the answer is a diverse portfolio. As an investor for many decades, I've seen with my own eyes the wisdom of that. Sure, you'll take a loss like everyone else, but unlike everyone else your losses will be smaller. You'll miss out on the big gains that those with good timing will get. You'll also miss out on the absolutely huge losses of those that timed it wrong. Diversify, stay the course, it'll come back: that I've never seen fail after decades of investing. (But for $DEITY's sake, stay away from AI-specific companies if you can do it.)
Yup. For those interested we have a similar approach where the fibre to the home is owned by a regulated provider that is required to offer its service to all retail service providers (RSPs) at the same price. Competition is strong.
The rise in sales of GLP-1 products also coincides with the decline in self-help books. Those products are highly effective at delivering some of the hardest self-help outcomes, so why buy a book when you can inject?
Perhaps think of the stock as a value stock, not a growth/momentum stock.
The thesis is that they should survive and thrive as an investment asset through the AI bust, but performance during the AI bubble is poor. If you are a longer term investor then B2B SaaS valuations appear cheap right now, but you need to be able to weather the storm of missing out on the AI infused bubble.
As evidence the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index is at all-time lows for EV/revenue multiples. While some of the companies will see growth rates impacted by AI, that only explains a little bit of the drop in multiples versus the past.
And to add - tea is graded at source, and buyers purchase based on grade. So a low quality tea bag will have tea that is objectively worse than a high quality one, while the best tea is never near a bag.
Yeas ago I motorcycled a lot, all over the world. I escalated to an air horn and hi-viz. But I pretty quickly realized that these made no tangible difference to the behavior of larger vehicle drivers. So I ended up for later vehicles with a stock horn and hi-viz only for heavy rain.
These days our family cycles a lot for commuting. It’s really easy to observe that people in vehicles treat us far better if we look like humans, wearing normal street clothes, rather than wearing high-viz or, far worse, cycling gear.
The bike bell is for polite notice, not alarming. The best alarm system you have is your voice, which is variable volume and tone. For ultimate effect slap the panels of cars, as it is very loud inside the vehicle.
Slapping panels in the US will occasionally get people trying to fight you, as I've had happen. Not really sure what a good solution to that looks like short of cultural changes.
As a pedestrian I slapped a panel of a slow car that failed to yield to me at a crossing. The driver glared at me and looked ready to reverse into me. I never slapped any panel any more.
Sadly I had to kick a few cars that thought they could run me off my motorcycle. Worked every time. All of them didn't look out the window or they would have looked right into my face. Yelling and horn did absolutely nothing.
Most of them were extremely apologetic or even shocked (as if I appeared from thin air). None of them were angry for scratching their door. Some people are just lost in thought it seems...
> or even shocked (as if I appeared from thin air)
Motorcyclists are invisible. Never rely on others seeing you, ride as if they're an obstacle you have to navigate.
You can hide a whole truck behind the A-pillar of modern cars, let alone a motorcycle. At certain angles, human eyes have complete blind spots that we're not aware of because our brain filters them out. Motorcycles fit perfectly into those.
Never hover in people's blind spots. Pass quickly or stay back. Do not drive parallel with another vehicle. Goes for cars too.
When approaching another car perpendicularly (like an intersection), remember that humans lose depth perception because their nose covers one of the eyes. A driver literally cannot tell how far you are. Our usual proxy is the distance between headlights. Motorcyles have 1 headlight so this heuristic doesn't work, but we don't realize that it doesn't.
Yup. If you don't have armor around you the only real defense is to assume you are invisible unless you know they've seen you or can't help but see you (for example, going in the traffic direction in front of a stopped car that's waiting to go--they're looking at the cars, they'll see anything else coming along.) Doesn't matter if you have wheels or feet under you, you still are invisible.
Oh I know. They look at me while turning left cutting me off.
Maybe I need a bigger bike, the 2cyl 400cc is particularly invisible. ;)
Best one was a woman who cut me off doing her left turn. I high-beamed her and honked. She put her hands in front of her face and came to a dead stop in my lane directly in front of me. I was already braking before I honked. Nothing happened. I stopped wondering and just assume everyone is out to kill me.
> I high-beamed her and honked. She put her hands in front of her face and came to a dead stop in my lane directly in front of me.
Personally I skip the honking and high beams. Just perform evasive action assuming driver will continue on their current path at roughly their current speed. Swerving behind their path of travel usually works great.
Spooked drivers behave erratically. Very dangerous.
So far I've had 0 serious incidents in ~8 years of riding. A couple close calls when I was being an idiot. So I think my approach is working :)
Honking is more for the people behind/around me. I also don't want to be hit by inattentive people following me to closely.
May I ask where you are riding? I am currently in Bavaria. The danger level is usually higher after the winter. Drivers need to re-accustom themselves to sharing the road with two wheeled riders.
Evasive action could be even more dangerous in cities. In my experience being able to come to a stop without hitting anything is even better.
Lot's of dead people had the right of way. Ride safe, I agree. I also had 0 accidents so far in 30 years. But you still experience new things you hadn't thought would be an issue.
San Francisco Bay Area. I never got into motorcycling back in Europe although the roads are lovely, the short riding season felt like a deterrent. Also the extremely long process to get a license.
Here in CA it was almost scary easy to get M certified.
I like it. In particular the descriptions of how he reacted when confronted. The public key anecdote is a red herring - there is far more convincing evidence in the article.
An alternative perspective is that if someone sends me a Google sheet link then I know almost immediately that is probably not a “serious” document.
Similarly with Google Docs, as “serious” documents with proper tracking of changes and so on are in Word.
Of course the uses of serious spreadsheets are often in finance and serious documents are in law.
> “serious” documents with proper tracking of changes and so on are in Word
How does the tracking works in Word? I've never seen this proper setup so I'm just ignorant when it comes to this. If I hear "Word" and versioning in the same sentence, I'd just assume we're talking about the doc_v1_3_final_really_final_public_feb_2024.docx naming.
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